HDTach results

Website: HD Tach 3.0





We also connected up both drives to the P55 SATA 3Gbps ports to see how both drives performed while bolted directly to the chipset and DMI bus. In addition, with Intel's Matrix Storage driver installed, this also boosts performance: we wanted to know if this currently makes external SATA 6Gbps chipsets irrelevant.

Well, the read speeds are again, identical, so no change there. Write performance is again in favour of the Seagate drive by nearly seven per cent, despite both hard disks being level pegged on the SATA 3Gbps interface. Both motherboards perform within an experimental margin too - there's no difference here.

Burst speed is still in favour of the Asus board though by a few MB/s with both hard drives, and where the Seagate naturally lead on its SATA 6Gbps interface before, it's much more limited than the Western Digital on SATA 3Gbps which actually improves its performance slightly.

In terms of latency, clearly it's not the chipset and SATA connection making the difference - the Seagate drive is an epic 40-50 per cent slower than the Western Digital, with again, the Gigabyte board hindering an additional fraction.